Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups and Categorize emails
I disagree. You can't point to a single feature enabled in one product and say that every other product on the market should offer an equivalent. That's not the way that things work. And any reasonable assessment of what G Suite offers in terms of functionalty will conclude that Office 365 has more. (My view on the matter is at https://www.petri.com/battle-cloud-supremacy).
Customers can't behave like babies and stamp their feet and say "we want" either. That's no way to exploit the potential of software. Instead, after they make a decision as to what cloud application suite to use (hopefully Office 365), they need to understand the capabilities of what's available and decide what makes sense for them to use in the context of their business requirements. There is seldom a 100% perfect fit, so some compromise is necessary. Heat from management might highlight an issue, but it won't solve it. Nor will it make software change to create new functionality.
The Office 365 Groups roadmap has a lot of new features coming in the relatively near future (see the Ignite sessions for details). Some of those features (like soft-delete) are absolutely more important than shared access to a group mailbox through Outlook desktop, especially when a perfectly reasonable alternative (regular shared mailboxes) exists.
All software follows a development plan. Features in that plan are weighted against other demands in order of importance. My perspective (and feel free to disagree) is that what you're looking for is relatively low importance when compared to other features, like making sure that the hybrid experience for groups is more seamless than it is now. You can lobby for the feature you want... But you'd probably be better off understanding the full breadth of collaborative capabilities that exist within Office 365 so that you can guide customers to make the right choice for their needs. In fact, it seems like Outlook desktop is the point of unification here as both shared mailboxes and groups are resources accessible through the same client.
What you can also point to is the dramatic evolution of Office 365 Groups since their introduction two years ago. Groups have come a long way. More needs to be done and will be done, if not when and how some people expect that to happen.
It has been often said before and I guess it's worth saying again that Office 365 Groups are not the silver bullet for all forms of collaboration that exists within the service. Sometimes, as in this instance, shared mailboxes are a better solution because you have full access to all of the Outlook desktop features that interact with the mailbox. I should imagine that it would take quite a bit of engineering effort to enable Outlook to support the same functionality with Groups.
The best advice is to keep on using shared mailboxes. They work.
- Hi i have to say that it is not abiut what is offered on Office 365 but what people need and what enterprises need.
Google already has the collaborative Inbox since long time and it simply delivered what people require.
Office 365 is there also for long time and when it started to offer groups, it did not deliver a unified complete solution for enterprises, but an experience that has not much customization and then we are hearing that we should continue use shared groups.
So I imagine our teams will have shared mailboxes that cannot be accessed via mobile and then office groups for another type of collaboration.we are getting heat from management why dont we simply use google collaboration if it delivered a unified solution and i am fighting to keep using O365.
We are in a position that we need to deliver full business solution. At least planner has roadmap for mobile app and will have ability to invite external parties so those are needed features and microsoft will deliver. But for groups the roadmap doesnt have totally new features, so we are not sure what would be the future of groups.
Dont get me wrong, I love O365 and love groups, but if groups is going to be the next big thing then we expect it to deliver like other solutions in the market at least.
We cannit go with (ok use shared mailboxes for this and DL for that and groups for this) instead people wants one unified workplace. If groups is not gonna deliver then it will not be deployed. People will not go with two solution they want one.I disagree. You can't point to a single feature enabled in one product and say that every other product on the market should offer an equivalent. That's not the way that things work. And any reasonable assessment of what G Suite offers in terms of functionalty will conclude that Office 365 has more. (My view on the matter is at https://www.petri.com/battle-cloud-supremacy).
Customers can't behave like babies and stamp their feet and say "we want" either. That's no way to exploit the potential of software. Instead, after they make a decision as to what cloud application suite to use (hopefully Office 365), they need to understand the capabilities of what's available and decide what makes sense for them to use in the context of their business requirements. There is seldom a 100% perfect fit, so some compromise is necessary. Heat from management might highlight an issue, but it won't solve it. Nor will it make software change to create new functionality.
The Office 365 Groups roadmap has a lot of new features coming in the relatively near future (see the Ignite sessions for details). Some of those features (like soft-delete) are absolutely more important than shared access to a group mailbox through Outlook desktop, especially when a perfectly reasonable alternative (regular shared mailboxes) exists.
All software follows a development plan. Features in that plan are weighted against other demands in order of importance. My perspective (and feel free to disagree) is that what you're looking for is relatively low importance when compared to other features, like making sure that the hybrid experience for groups is more seamless than it is now. You can lobby for the feature you want... But you'd probably be better off understanding the full breadth of collaborative capabilities that exist within Office 365 so that you can guide customers to make the right choice for their needs. In fact, it seems like Outlook desktop is the point of unification here as both shared mailboxes and groups are resources accessible through the same client.
What you can also point to is the dramatic evolution of Office 365 Groups since their introduction two years ago. Groups have come a long way. More needs to be done and will be done, if not when and how some people expect that to happen.
I disagree in almost every way. That is a developer point of view, and it's extremely short sighted. As an engineer, I can tell you that as of Today, nearly every Office 365 app is missing critical features. For this to have been a discussion in December of 2016, and in January of 2018 you still can't categorize or organize messages in every way, is just ridiculous. So many apps are missing the features that would make them work, I'm not talking about major changes, but to introduce a Group type Email feature and forget that users might want to be able to organize or categorize mail in that group, is insane, and illustrates to me a disconnect between the developers and the user base. It's like releasing a new Car and having the steering wheel be a "TBD" feature. You need to at least have the basics in place before you release apps and I think MS is in such a rush to keep up with all the new cloud type vendors (Slack, etc) that they are rushing products to market long before they're ready.
